Page 45 Comic & Graphic Novel Reviews May 2017 week three

The Sound Of The World By Heart h/c (£22-99, Magnetic Press) by Giacomo Bevilacqua…

“A challenge to my inability to communicate, to my misanthropy, to my constant need for a challenge.
“… A challenge to respect the rules one places upon himself, whether he likes them or not.
“… A challenge to find love, the kind we often unknowingly brush against on the street, only to forget a moment later, overwhelmed by the river of our own thoughts, and the thoughts of a million passersby…
“That pure love that I have often found in the instance of a photograph…
“It is a challenge to the city of New York, the city of my birth, the city that sheltered and cared for me, both physically and mentally, throughout the years…
“… Sometimes successfully…
“… Sometimes not.”

Of course… it’s rather tricky to mend a broken heart and find love afresh if you’re not planning on speaking to anyone at all for sixty days…

Such is the scope of the emotionally self-sequestering challenge that Sam is taking on, at his own behest, and also his magazine’s editor Jorge. I think that probably reveals that Sam is a masochist and Jorge definitely has sadist tendencies, but it’s certainly an intriguing premise to explore both the fractured psychology of an individual and also the near-infinite fractal human interactions taking place within a city like New York on a continuous basis.

Like an endless game of bagatelle with eight million unpredictable balls, with pointy elbows, pinging around on the most insanely complex ever evolving three-dimensional board imaginable. How could you possibly hope to find the one person able to repair you emotionally in such an environment?

Our story begins with an unknown person narrating Sam’s epic undertaking to us, and also providing us with some personal background on our protagonist. Thus we gradually begin to understand the apparent reasons for his peculiar experiment as he strolls through the city of his birth, all the while carefully composing and taking photographs. I had presumed the narrator would turn out to be a possible future soulmate looking back sagely. In fact, it turns out to be someone completely different and entirely unexpected. And yet it makes perfect sense, in retrospect.

Giamcomo Bevilacqua treats us to a visual feast with shots of skyscrapers, Central Park and people, lots of people, from every conceivable aperture and angle. His art style, particularly of architecture, reminds me of Paul ALL OVER COFFEE / EVERYTHING IS ITS OWN REWARD Madonna, though a touch tighter. Plus this work is all in vibrant colour that perfectly captures the feel of a gloriously bright autumn day, even down to striations of wispy cloud being gently pulled across the sky, accompanied by the vapour trail from a departing aeroplane. The only thing that’s black and white are Sam’s photographs. As a creature of habit, he’s only ever printed his photographs sans colour, preferring to use the same print shop whenever he’s in the neighbourhood.

So, what happens to shatter Sam’s pseudo-serenity and deflect our tale into an altogether different direction? Well, it’s the unexpected presence of a red-haired girl in many of his most recent batch of photographs. She’s definitely there, in full glorious technicolour, which is a conundrum in and of itself given the photos obviously aren’t. But the real puzzle perhaps, is that Sam is entirely certain she wasn’t there when he took the pictures. Not once. After all, as someone who carefully composes every picture he takes, he knows exactly what, and who, is in the scene he wants to convey. And the girl was most assuredly not, when he took the pictures, in any of them…

Thus begins Sam’s real journey of introspection, finally getting below the protective surface layers he’d so carefully built up, as the mysterious red-haired girl begins to appear in front of him in the real world, seemingly at every turn. Sam’s reaction is always to turn away, to run, to flee. But what precisely is he really running from? And where will he end up? And who will be there? Some connections, however tenuously established, it seems, just can’t be broken…

What a wonderfully moving, poignant and beautiful work this is. As we, and Sam, finally gain a true understanding of what’s going on inside his head, plus out there in New York city, it seems all those millions and millions of endless human collisions can produce some quite startling and unexpected results.

Hostage h/c (£16-99, Jonathan Cape) by Guy Delisle…

“Nothing happened last night.
“Nobody came to get me out of here.
“Maybe they’ll come tonight?
“In the meantime, I’ll be spending another day attached to this radiator.”

Guy PYONG YANG / SHENZHEN / BURMA / JERUSALEM Delisle returns, but this time with someone else’s story. Actually, I kind of feel his travelogues are often really the locals’ stories of the places he visits, he’s just the conduit for expounding their unique flavour of cultural craziness, but here he is ‘merely’ the messenger.

If you ever wanted to know just how boring, frustrating and soul destroying getting kidnapped and chained to a selection of ironmongery for a period of several months is, then this is the book for you! Now, you might think a book where practically nothing happens would be rather dull, but in fact the exact opposite is true. Guy Delisle brings to vivid life the entire spectrum of emotions Christophe André was put through repeatedly during his confinement.

Desperate for any shred of information that might indicate even the teensy-weeniest step of progress towards regaining his liberty, Christophe instead focuses on making certain he always knows precisely what date it is, wondering whether his sister would postpone her wedding or not (she didn’t, instead leaving an empty chair and plate in his honour at the reception) and, being a military history buff, re-enacting famous battles from around the globe in his head.

He did also conduct some rather amusing ongoing character assessments of his small gang of captors, including casting one very adroitly as Thénardier, the crooked innkeeper from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables! Plus continually be on the look-out for escape opportunities, of course… When those very slim possibilities of flight did occasionally arise, Christophe is totally torn between the ridiculous risks involved in making a break for it from an unknown location, with no knowledge of the local language whatsoever, versus sitting tight and simply waiting for what will surely be his inevitable negotiated release… After all, it’s not like he’s being treated badly during his incarceration, despite his total isolation. It’s a nigh-on impossible conundrum, I think, that one.

Guy captures all the sanity-sapping subtleties of Christophe’s plight to perfection, completely conveying the utter, unbearable mind-shattering loneliness of being locked away with absolutely no one to communicate with, all the whilst tormenting yourself wondering precisely what is being done to rescue you, and why on earth it is taking so long. He’s employed his trademark minimal colour palette once again, but his figures and facial features are more realistic than his autobiographical works, purely I suspect because that particular style is deployed for maximum comedic effect whereas he clearly wants to damp that down here.

Not to say that there isn’t humour in this work, there is, because obviously, it’s an entirely absurd situation, and human beings can find things to laugh at in even the most adverse of circumstances, especially given that we know Christophe did make it home safe and sound. In that respect this work reminds me of THE PHOTOGRAPHER by Didier Lefèvre & Emmanuel Guibert, where the main protagonist manages to get himself kidnapped in remote Afghanistan and has myriad tight scrapes and escapades before finally getting back to Kabul.

Roughneck h/c (£20-00, Gallery 13 Comics) by Jeff Lemire…

“I was never really a hockey player… I was just a thug. At least now I don’t have to pretend to be something I’m not.”

The doyen of downbeat is back with a frosty contemporary fiction feast of self-destruction and misery. Straight out in graphic novel form, unlike his equally excellent new ongoing mildly mysterious monthly series ROYAL CITY, this is Jeff firmly smack bang against-the-boards back in ESSEX COUNTY territory. Even to the extent of having a former professional ice skating central protagonist, hence the body check…

I’m starting to think Jeff is a frustrated plumber. By which I actually mean an ice hockey player who likes to go get the puck out of trouble, working in the dirty areas of the rink. Because that’s exactly how he writes. He drops his characters in a whole world of pain, leaving them slipping, sliding and scrapping on the metaphorical thin ice for their lives, the Zamboni bearing down on them for good measure… then writes a way out for them, even if they don’t exactly all make it out intact. But then, getting run over by a Zamboni will do that to you.*

Here, in the frostbitten, half-forgotten arse end of Canada that is the small (ice-)burg of Pimitamon, known locally as The Pit, we find Derek Ouelette, temporarily assuaging his ever present despair with an equally ever handy bottle of beer and / or shot of the hard stuff. Plagued by headaches from his days as an enforcer out on the rink in the NHL, before the red mist took his career in a spectacularly brutal, gruesome loss of temper, he’s now barely making ends meet as a short order cook back in his home town, whilst sleeping on a cot in the janitor’s office at the local ice rink.

He’s still willing to fight all-comers, though, being one stubborn Cement Head who’s clearly not learnt his lesson yet, but this time his opponents seem entirely to be those idiotic enough to taunt someone whose former profession was repeatedly battering people in the face for fun. They might think they have a chance against someone who’s slightly the worse for wear and seemingly over the hill, but given Derek used to give people a good beatdown whilst dancing around on ice skates, I hardly think a few beers is going to prove too much of an impediment to his balance or indeed fisticuffs technique. It doesn’t.

So, it seems like Derek is on an endless cycle of drink, beat, repeat which is only going to end up with him getting sent to prison, killing someone or possibly even both. So what will make him change his ways? Not even repeated ‘final’ warnings from his old school friend, and police officer, Ray, can make him hang up his metaphorical gloves. Enter stage left Beth, his long lost sister, who ran away from home as a teenager, down to the bright lights of the proverbial big city Toronto, ending up drug-addled and sleeping rough for a few years, before allegedly getting clean and her shit together. So if that’s the case, how come she’s turned up back in The Pit, penniless, with a black eye?

Well, she hasn’t got her shit together, obviously, she isn’t clean either, but she is pregnant… and the fruitcake future father with the free-flying fists is in hot pursuit… Guess it’s at times like this that having an equally psychopathic brother to turn to could come in handy. Except… remember what I said about Derek being on the probable path to killing somebody and winding up in jail…? Still, it’s difficult to imagine him suddenly turning into the type of guy who he’d once of described in hockey parlance as having ‘eggs in their pockets’…

As much as I love Jeff’s writing, no matter who is illustrating, it is always wonderful to see Jeff wield the pencils and paints himself too. He’s gone for a typically subdued palette here, just black lines and shading with light watercolour blues, reflecting the chilly northern landscape and stunted, alcohol and oxycontin-anaesthetised emotional vibe, similar to ESSEX COUNTY and THE UNDERWATER WELDER. Where we have full colour panels here, as with his TRILLIUM and SWEET TOOTH, it is always either in flashback to scenes of the kids’ (in-)tense family life growing up with an abusive Cannuck knucklehead father and their put-upon Native mother, or Derek’s glory days out on the ice. And hallucinations…

It’s a device that well serves to further impress upon us the oppressive situation and circumstances of Derek and Beth’s lives. Then, there is an exquisite use of a single additional colour on two other pages which, well, I have perhaps said enough already, so I shall leave you to discover those masterstrokes for yourselves. In summary, another contemporary classic from Jeff.

* No Zambonis were hurt in the writing of this graphic novel; however several Hosers do get a good thwacking from the Cement Head.

“Okay… I asked you a question: where’s our daughter? Where’s the baby?”
“Get out of here, Luke. I’m on a case.”
“I don’t give anything close to a shit.”
“Just leave. This… this isn’t the time. You were following me.”
““Not the time”?! Where’s my BABY?”
“Stop this macho shit. It doesn’t scare me.”

Jessica Jones has well and truly finished her extended maternity leave and is back in the investigative saddle, going undercover, playing double agent, and generally getting herself neck-deep into all sorts of preposterous trouble trying to find out who Alison Greene is working for. Alison Greene being the bean-counting, low level accountant Captain Marvel gave the full shakedown to, thanks to some equally shaky precognitive intel from the Inhuman Ulysses, during CIVIL WAR II. Ms. Greene was seemingly completely innocent, much to Captain Marvel’s extreme embarrassment. Now it turns out, unsurprisingly, she has an axe she’d like to grind on Captain Marvel’s head and is trying to recruit Jessica Jones into her merry scheme.

Meanwhile, Jessica’s also been hired by Mrs. Brownlee to investigate why her husband claims to no longer be her husband any more, but someone else entirely. Given our superhero chums propensities for flitting from dimension to dimension and traversing back and forth to other worlds when the mood strikes them, a la SECRET WARS, she’s desperately hoping for some sort of explanation that might mean he’s not had a complete psychotic break. With Jessica’s connection to the capes and tights world, Mrs. Brownlee’s basically hoping she might entertain her insane sounding theory…

“So we’re clear… You’d rather pay me to find out if your husband is from another earth than have him checked into a…”
“I’ll pay whatever.”

It’s seemingly a nothing, nonsense case, right…?

There’s much that’s utterly brilliant in the opener of this new run of everyone’s favourite female Marvel fuck up. (I nearly left out the female, but come on, all equality and feminism aside, Clint Barton is clearly even more of a fuck up than Jessica Jones, hands down, no contest!) In fact I think there is only one thing wrong with it. Meh, maybe two if I am being picky.

Firstly, it’s just great to see Alias Investigations back. As fun as Jess’ appearances in POWER MAN AND IRON FIST are, as the alpha-wife, hen-pecking poor put-upon Luke into submission, this is the version of Jones we want. Then, the dialogue, which is absolutely Bendis at his best, with every page a pure pleasure of witty to-and-fro. The only other thing he’s writing at the moment that’s anywhere near as good as this is INFAMOUS IRON DOOM featuring the trials and tribulations of a certain Victor Von Doom trying his hand a little superheroing. Then, there’s that ‘nothing, nonsense case’, which is almost certainly going to turn out to be anything but, given the sting in the tale at the end of this volume. Fabulous stuff.

So what doesn’t work for me then? Well, I find it kind of hard to believe that Alison Greene thinks Jessica would betray her friends, particularly her best friend, Carol Danvers. It’s a real stretch, frankly. By the end of this volume I understood precisely why Bendis did it, and I shall say no more for fear of spoilers, but… it still feels forced.

Then, my real bugbear: Jessica takes Dani, Luke’s and her baby, and leaves the marital home, without any word of explanation to Luke, as part of her going underground cover story. Yes, you can say she felt she couldn’t tell anyone at all, including her husband, the father of her child, what was going on, blah blah blah, but the reality of it is, would she really put her husband and the father of her child through that, with no word of warning whatsoever, just out of the blue? I think not.

I understand Bendis clearly feels Jess works best as a character as the isolated outsider, rather than the happy contented wife, presumably also explaining the double meaning in the volume’s subtitle ‘Uncaged’, which is quite clever, actually, I will give him that. This set up immediately achieves that isolation, stirring up a whole cement mixer load of dramatic tension between our leading dramatis personae as a bonus, but again, it felt rather forced.

It’s almost as though Marvel, having seen the success of the Jessica Jones TV show – plus the forthcoming Defenders series featuring the character – has said, “Bendis, bring her back in the comics, just like before, exactly like before, nothing must change, just like Stan said, make it happen”. “It’s only a comic, Jonathan!” I hear you cry. But when Bendis has made his name writing realistic characters (and dialogue), I expect perfection.

Still, that sting in the tale I’m talking about, makes it all worthwhile and carries the story over the rocky plotholed (sic) ground. Plus I’m still reading the monthly single issues, so I’m clearly hooked and will shut up moaning now! And this title is a trillion times better than most of the utter shite Marvel is churning out at the moment. I really will shut up now.

Previous ALIAS collaborators Michael Gaydos and Matt Hollingsworth return on line art and colours, respectively, which is also a definite huge plus as the change in art ruined the PULSE material for me. Again, this welcome return of said dynamic drawing duo is presumably trying to make it feel like it is business as usual, but they are the definitive Jessica Jones art team so why not.

Also, at the risk of seeming like I actually condone variants, which I really don’t, I was pleased to see they had included all the cover art, as chapter breaks too, rather than tucked away unnoticed at the back. When you’ve got the likes of David Mack, Alex Maleev, David Aja doing some brilliant covers, they do deserve as many eyeballs as possible rolling over them. There are also some totally duff covers from other people, mind, but they just make you appreciate the genius of the likes of the Mack even more.

Arrived, Online & Ready To Buy!

Reviews already up if they’re new formats of previous graphic novels. The best of the rest will be reviewed next week while others will retain their Diamond previews information we receive displayed as ‘Publisher Blurb’.

News!

ONE WEEK UNTIL IT’S TOO LATE TO ORDER!

ITEM! Hello! Would you like some lovely merchandise designed by the equally adorable Jamie McKelvie? If so, you really, really, really need to pre-order by May 23rd, please to avoid that dreaded tears / bedtime interface we would all rather avoid.

Why? Because that’s when Page 45 has to place its own pre-orders, and re-orders of comics merchandise are rarely available. Ta!

FAQ: THE WICKED + THE DIVINE VOL 5: IMPERIAL PHASE S/C is due 7th June, and you could pre-order that too is you’re of a mind to, but that isn’t even an inch as important because we constantly re-order. You just might like to have it shipped to your door ASAP!

It’s probably going to be closer to 1,500 by the time you see this, but what a lot of grinning faces we’ve seen!

What I love so much about it is that the books you are buying are brilliant. They’re not rubbish, or else why would we have reviewed so many of them?

No, we’re simply doing this because it’s only Phase One of Page 45’s Evolution this year – a means to a most emphatic, architectural end – and because it has been proven that having too much to choose from destroys sales.

But please don’t think this mean we believe we’re selling jam or we’re going to cut back on diversity. Oooooh no!

Just bulk.

Comics is a visual medium, particularly for kids who don’t browse by spine, and this will allow us to present more of the very best quality comics face-on.

You can always order in whatever you want by asking at the counter, regardless of whether we stock it on our shelves.

It’s basically the same thing as Page 45’s Comicbook Of The Month, which we were begged for when a customer called Simon Ghent simply could not handle so many reviews of great graphic novels every month, and wanted to buy what we told him to!

Hello, by the way: we love giving shop-floor recommendations tailored to your tastes. Just ask at the counter!

THANK you! xxx

– Stephen

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